Page:The Prussian officer, and other stories, Lawrence, 1914.djvu/218

 She lifted her head, averting her face from him. She refused to answer. Then she said:

“I don’t know what you mean, by carrying on. I loved him from the first days I met him—two months after I went to stay with Miss Birch.”

“And do you reckon he loved you?” he jeered.

“I know he did.”

“How do you know, if he’d have no more to do with you?”

There was a long silence of hate and suffering.

“And how far did it go between you?” he asked at length, in a frightened, stiff voice.

“I hate your not-straightforward questions,” she cried, beside herself with his baiting. “We loved each other, and we were lovers—we were. I don’t care what you think: what have you got to do with it? We were lovers before ever I knew you——”

“Lovers—lovers,” he said, white with fury, “You mean you had your fling with an army man, and then came to me to marry you when you’d done——”

She sat swallowing her bitterness. There was a long pause.

“Do you mean to say you used to go—the whole hogger?” he asked, still incredulous.

“Why, what else do you think I mean?” she cried brutally.

He shrank, and became white, impersonal. There was a long, paralysed silence. He seemed to have gone small.

“You never thought to tell me all this before I married you,” he said, with bitter irony, at last.

“You never asked me,” she replied.